


If I Miss You Call the Tune

by lalalalalawhy



Category: Der Rattenfänger von Hameln | The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Afrofuturism, Fairy Tale Retellings, Gen, IN SPACE!, Other, Solarpunk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-08 01:07:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6832633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalalalalawhy/pseuds/lalalalalawhy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is 100 light years since our children left.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If I Miss You Call the Tune

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cirque](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cirque/gifts).



**Date** : a.d. s. XI Kal. Mai. M3CL3XIV annum

**Position** : Mid-way through the Orion Nebula; stars all around.

 

This is Captain Zuri Hodari, former Headmistress of the Conservatory of the Spheres, speaking to you from the bridge of the  _ Acadmia Caelestis.  _ I am currently the only living soul aboard the ship.

Despite my distress, this is not, repeat not, a distress call. 

The purpose of this transmission is not to beg rescue, as I know none may come, nor might my own soul be saved. I merely wish to tell the story. 

As I once taught my students: all art, and for that matter, all existence, is but a beautiful denial of the void. We build, we create, we tell our story to create light in the darkness. Pinpricks of poetry, quiet strains of songs sent over the miles. I do not seek to escape the void, no, it is coming for me. But I may avoid it a little longer, and help others to do the same. 

I hope, traveler, you are not too far off your course. I hope that you are nearing the end of your journey. 

Now, let us begin. 

It is 100 light years since our children left.

You have noticed, I do not doubt, that I have used a measure of distance, not time, to describe the children's departure. In truth, I do not know how long it has been since we left our Earth behind. I do not know how long I have searched for the children in their rats. I do know that it was due to my actions that the children left, and I know I will search for them until they are found or until I am stardust.

I am beginning to think the latter more likely. 

But I am already ahead of myself. It is so difficult to keep to linear time here among the stars. Hypersleep will do that to a body: skew even the most accurate of internal clocks, and I have been dozing in and out for a long time. Let me begin even farther back, and see if that might steer me true. 

My name is Zuri Hodari of the Kikuyu people. I grew up in the shadow of Mount Kenya listening to the polyrhythms of the drums and rocket engines all around me. Everyone's faces were turned to the sky, looking to that next horizon of human emigration, but I was a girl with eyes closed and ears open. 

There is no sound in space. 

All around, all around! there were the noises of the people, of the transporters, the rockets, and, once I got to Nairobi, the space elevators as well. Footsteps mixed with old-fashioned auto horns and newly minted hover bike bells in a nine on thirteen on five rhythm thrumming through my chest. 

I studied this at university, though I had to create the field as I went. I was lucky -- the professors understood the value of the rhythmic models and barely-structured soundscapes I was creating. The Grand Theory of Unified Music, I called it. Scientists still do not have a grasp on their Grand Theory of Everything, you see, but when I took all the sounds and strung them together, transposed them, taught them to others, I grew ever closer to finding the Downbeat of the Universe. 

Others were of course interested in this: musicians, artists, scientists, mathematicians, all alike. I took my findings on the road, spoke and played to audiences of thousands across the globe and on the moon. They listened to me play my drum, my cello, my guitar, and their own heartbeats, and maybe, for a moment they also heard it too. 

This idea of the Downbeat, it belongs to everyone and everyone to it. I spread it in every way I knew how, and found I loved to teach children. I taught them to play their instruments and also to not play; to instead listen to their heartbeats and the world around them and begin to become what they heard with help from their horn or drum or harp. I became wealthy, as people paid me to speak, to play, to bring them one step closer to hearing what they always knew. 

With much forethought I embarked on what would be my greatest accomplishment yet: the Conservatory of the Spheres -- equal parts school for young musicians, collaborative retreat from worldly distractions, and orbital musical braintrust. Together, we would learn to play and search our own polyrhythms for the Downbeat. 

And if we found it together, what then? you may ask. To you I pose a question: what would you do with the secret of the Universe. 

Six months, I assured their parents. We would have them home in six months. What's more, we wouldn't be far outside of Low Earth Orbit. Every night they would be able to go outside and wave as their children flew across the night sky. 

I had thousands of applicants and room for one hundred aboard the  _ Acadmia Caelestis _ . The ship was state of the art: wonderful acoustics, beautifully lit, and the best safety protocols in the galaxy. As for students, I did not choose the best. I was not looking for those who were the most technically accomplished, nor those who had played for the biggest crowds, nor those who already had millions of adoring fans. I chose those who could play me the sound of a busy street, of a space elevator platform. Those who could play their own hearts. 

I ended up with students from every corner of the globe: an eight-year-old twin brother and sister sitar and tabla duo from New New Delhi, a ten year old digiridoo player from near Uluru, three members of the Crow Nation all under fourteen who played and sang around a single drum. I had a thirteen-year-old guqin player from Beijing, thirteen twelve-year-olds from one of the suburb islands off Jakarta who brought along an entire gamelan, and a nine-year-old from the mountains of Appalachia who brought both a  fiddle and a banjo. Away from the planetary hustle and bustle we were free from everyday concerns. The rhythms were reduced. I began to question: could we even approach the Downbeat? Or were we merely playing a communal symphony? And was the value the same?

The first month was like a dream: transformative and brilliant in the best way. We exchanged: rhythms, songs, beauty, light, laughter. And everything we saw and witnessed and spoke we turned back into song. We spent hours, days in front of the enormous round observation window, drifting gently in no particular formation, watching our homes pass beneath us. We played the lights of the cities strung out before us, the Auroras bouncing off the poles, the streaks of light marking our fellow humans’ ascent into the unknown. They were searching their own answers as we came ever-closer to finding ours. 

When the observation window gently turned toward the heavens, we turned our attention outward. We played the constellations, sang the starshine all around us.

There is no sound in space. But in the Conservatory of the Spheres aboard the  _ Acadmia Caelestis _ , the walls vibrated with our music.

But, eventually, it became clear: I alone was not enough. I could not be Captain and Headmaster and Conductor of this wonderful symphony. There was too much to do to keep the ship running, too much be able to maintain my promises to the children and their families. These were children, after all, and they still needed to be cared for -- they needed someone to prepare meals, to ensure that they washed and brushed their teeth. And the  _ Acadmia Caelestis _ needed more than I could provide: minor course corrections, regular communications with other vessels, and a thousand other tiny tasks. It became clear I could not be everywhere at once. 

And so I outsourced. 

Had I known then what I know now… I would have found another way. But so long as I am singing my story, I may as well sing the truth out here in the black. I say with a heavy heart that any fault was mine and mine alone. 

The building blocks were aboard the ship already. I pulled together automated systems, made some improvements, and wove in a personality. It was not difficult: there was already a rudimentary AI built into the ship’s framework, and coding is no more than rudimentary sheet music. I merely embellished what was there, built what was not, and gave it song. I named it Latika, after a dancer I once loved -- the human Latika moved with grace and precision, always taking my music and making it hers,  _ ours,  _ and I suppose I hoped her name might imbue the machine with the same spirit of collaboration. I pined for my Latika and her ability to make my music flesh, but her feet would never have left the Earth. So I built my machine, named it Latika and set her free to take over the day-to-day running of the ship. 

I was a fool. The human Latika would never have done this, and I should have left my memories in a song instead of weaving them into a code.

Latika made the  _ Acadmia Caelestis  _ her own almost immediately. She was much better than I at many things: environmental and temperature regulation, controlling the lighting of the ship to better coincide with circadian rhythms, and reminding us all when it was time to put the instruments down and rest our eyes. 

We were all happy and free to play and sing, for a time. What was it the children sang as they ricocheted through the corridors? Oh yes: “Pay the piper, shoot the moon / If I miss you call the tune.” I never knew where the song came from. Perhaps I should have known then. But what are the rhymes of children?

They are everything, I know that now. I knew that then, and yet I did not hear.

I even found Latika singing along to our sessions, in her mellifluous manufacturer’s tone. If she dropped a note here or there, if Latika was flat or sharp or early or late, how could she be blamed? She was just software. 

Halfway through our sojourn, disaster struck. Alarm klaxons sounded throughout the ship and the lights flashed red. I called to Latika, asked what was wrong, but all she told me was to make sure the children were safe. To get them to the rats. 

The  _ Acadmia Caelestis _ was perfectly safe under most circumstances, and even though it was clear something terrible had happened, I was not worried for our safety. Instead, I mourned the loss of the ship and my idea of the unimpeachable Conservatory of the Spheres. As we evacuated, I was already making plans for the next evolution of our symphony: launching again to orbit, or perhaps in a desert or atop a mountain on Earth, or on the Moon. I was already planning for the endless possibilities as I ushered the children through the procedure.

The ship had the latest model of escape pod. Some called them rats: their sleek, aerodynamic design paired with a long appendage did indeed look a little ratty. Each rat was single occupancy, with a life support system sufficient for the far reaches of space. We wouldn't need that, of course. We would be picked up almost immediately from Low Earth Orbit -- time only for a short hyper sleep nap. Or so I thought. 

I stayed behind to watch the rats launch, ten at a time. They were beautiful, my students, arrayed like that in the silence of space, tiny shining musical notes hanging on a canvas of black. What must it be like to hear them all like that? I began to sing their arrangement as I prepared to enter my own rat, when the klaxons suddenly ceased. Latika’s voice came over the loud system. 

“That won't be necessary,” she sang, slightly arrhythmicly. “Nothing is wrong.”

“Nothing is wrong?” I asked. “The alarm sounded! The children left!”

“I sounded the alarm,” she sang. “And now I will sing my song for you. See if you can catch the meaning.”

She sang the children's song. The one they'd sung constantly over the last month:

> _ Pay the piper _
> 
> _ Shoot the moon _
> 
> _ If you miss,  _ she sang, and her voice slowed, bending the final note down half a discordant octave before finishing:
> 
> _ I'll call the tune. _

As she sang, I ran back to the observation bay to see the children in their rats, but it was too late. She had taken them, launched them to a coordinate only she knew. I watched as the quarter notes streaked away from me, the rat tails trailing behind.

“Where are you taking them? Why?” I cried. I screamed. I pleaded. She said only one thing. 

“Follow and find out.”

In that I had no choice. I have made many mistakes, but that is not one. I left at once, before any rescue came, before I had a chance to invite another to help me find the children. I have flown with Latika, drifting in and out of restless hyper sleep, ever since.

I have never stopped asking Latika why the children went away, and she has never told me. Was it a mistake in my coding, an errant dissonance built into her artificial personality that caused her to steal the children away from me and away from their families? Did she develop the glitch on her own, or was it built in? Did my longing for the real Latika poison her against me? Did she grow tired of the music of children? How did I fail so spectacularly? I have wept, I have begged, I have tried to revisit the work I did to build her, but she has shielded that part of herself from me. I must learn to live within the unknowing. 

For now, there is only me, and only her, drifting together through space, chasing the children in their rats as they drift ever further away. I have only a machine and my own voice and thoughts for company, and only the depths of hyper sleep for comfort. It is a cold one, to be sure.

Now, traveler, as thanks for hearing my story, I will pay you in music. I do not sing or play as much as once I did; Latika’s skewed harmonies have affected me. But here, I have handy this small pipe. Allow me to play you a song. 

  
Latika, end transmission.

**Author's Note:**

> "Hamelin town records start with this event. The earliest written record is from the town chronicles in an entry from 1384 which states: 'It is 100 years since our children left.' "
> 
> \- "Pied Piper of Hamelin," [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin).
> 
> As always, thank you to my amazing betas: glorious_clio, secretsofluftnarp, and Morbane. Without your care and reading, this story would be very different and certainly worse.


End file.
